Perhaps this was mentioned, but are additional search criteria going to be available in emplode?

I can't seem to find a way to start the advanced search (such as to find all 'marked' records).

Thanks!!

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

I assume you have got onto the "Search" tab and have selected the "Advanced" radio button. You can now type a search string or criteria into the text box, then hit the "Search Now" button. I am sure you have sussed this bit.

The clever stuff is knowing what you want to use as a search key, or criteria. One of the ones Roger told me is that a file that has no more references (which therefore does not appear in any playlist) can be found by typing in refs=0 as the search string. This should give you a list of unreferenced files that you can choose to remove from the player, or move into a concrete playlist.

Unforch, I haven't sussed many other fancy ones, other than looking for specific strings in titles or artist names, for example. You'll need to buy Roger a pint for that sort of info...

Alternatively, if you are just looking for way to display marked tracks, right click on a column header in the "Detail" view of a playlist, and you should get a dialogue showing posible columns that can be displayed in the view. Scroll down until you find "Marked" and select it to add it to the column header list in the position you want to see it.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Rob,

Thanks for the info - I get it.

Hadn't sussed the right click on menu bar for columns bit - now that's clever/groovy.

Guys@Empeg (Roger) - any chance of understanding the fields/columns that we can search on in the 'advanced' search stuff?

Oh, and I can 'save' the searches, but where are they stored in the filesystem?

Cheers,

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

By tinkering around (reverse engineering is not allowed :) I found out the following:

Simple search

A simple search does an advanced search hidden from prying users eyes, which is simply quite clever. It's a "wrapper" for the advanced search, making it easy to use.

Advanced search

Roger's made quite a flexible system for the advanced search.

Fields:
artist (string)
genre (string)
tracknr (number)
comment (string)
genre (string)
year (number)
skipped_count (number of times you skipped the track with 2.x player software)
play_count (number of times the track was played with 2.x player software)
marked (string, "" is unmarked, "yes" is marked)
codec ("mp3", "wma", "wav")
copyright (number, 0 is no copyright, 1 is copyrighted)

numeric operators
<
>
<=
>=
=
!=
string operators
is (excact search)
like (glob search, example to find Various Artists): artist like "V*A*")
contains (what it says, must contain a sub-string)

and
or

You can also use ( and ) to group expressions.

Examples:

(artist is "U2") and (genre contains "rock")
year <= 1974
codec != "mp3"
marked = "yes"


There's probably more hidden in the search system, but here's what I could figure out in 30 minutes.

Have fun!


Lars

Search fields sound awfully like *1 tag file fields, don't they ?

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

I was about to say that reverse engineering is allowed because we link an LGPL component, but then I remembered that we nolonger use ID3Lib in emplode so now you can't

The search feature will be documented in the emplode help file, in the mean time you pretty much have it worked out. We're going to use advanced searches in a very cool new feature at some point, but I won't spoil the surprise!

Rob

We're going to use advanced searches in a very cool new feature at some point, but I won't spoil the surprise!

Playlists defined by searches or something even cooler?

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

You're getting warm, but something much cooler. That's the last I'll say on the subject until it happens

Rob

A little quirk I noticed...

You can search for all songs that aren't in any playlists (but are in the soups) using the advance search string "refs=0", but that case sensitive, so "Refs=0" doesn't do what you'd expect. It instead returns all tunes on the player.

This is the only field I see offhand that behaves this way (case-sensitive). I haven't really looked that hard, though. I noticed for fields like tracknr, it wouldn't matter if you typed "tracknr", "Tracknr", or "TraCknr"...it would still find the results correctly.

You also have to be careful, b/c with any other "equals zero" numeric value searches, if you specify a field that it doesn't recognize, it returns all tracks. A search for "madeup=0", it will return all tracks. So that's why "Refs=0" returned all tracks, even though they had more than zero references.

- Chris
32GB MK2 090000664 Smoke
Queue # 2 (who the heck was 1?)

For once I actually read the licence that is displayed during install, which says something along the lines of being allowed to reverse engineer it if you want...

__
Unit serial number 47 (was 330 in the queue)...

No negation operator?

(Not that I'll use Emplode, not using Windows, but it seems useful and may go into emptool and/or JEmplode...)

--
Toby Speight - 040103385

For the full gen on advanced searching, check out this. Give me a chance to write it first, though.


-- roger

The pseudo-tags (of which refs is one) are looked up, treating the tag name case-sensitively. The other tags are case-insensitive.

Thus Refs on any item returns the empty string. This evaluates to boolean false. You compare this for equality with a literal zero, which also evaluates to boolean false. They're equal, so everything matches, since the term just evaluates to true.


-- roger

Cool. How many other consumer appliance companies provide BNF?


Will advanced search be accessible from emptool?

In particular, I'd like to be able to list "marked" files.

--
Toby Speight - 040103385

It's possible, just read some other posts....

­­______________
Edwin de Vaan

Okay, i fianlly got around to playing with the advanced searching.... wow. Great stuff.

Quick question (and if this is obvious or already answered, ignore me)

I want to search for all my mp3's that aren't tagged with an artist. Simple enough:

"Artist is blank"

Sweet. Problem is, it also pulls up all the playlists. How would i filter out the playlists from the actual songs, either in the search or in the interface?

UPDATE: answered my own question:

'Artist is blank and codec is "mp3"' worked to solve that problem. =]


|| loren.cox ||

Edited by loren on 23/10/01 06:49 PM.

You could try:

type="tune" and not artist

'artist is blank' only works because 'is' is a synonym for '=' and blank is not a keyword. It's used as a tag lookup, and since it's not defined anywhere, it evaluates to the empty string.

My personal favourite:

type="tune" and not ( artist and source and genre and year )


-- roger

Those operators can be used for string comparisons, if you so desire. Types are promoted to the item on the right of the operator, which is a little odd. I don't remember whether it's left-associative or right-associative.


-- roger

Roger, any plans to implement regular expressions in advanved searches? I'd like to be able to search for improperly capitalized fields, for instance, "Midnight oil" or "Beds are burning" and correct them.

-Tony
MkII #554

Not unless I can find a decent regex library that's not GPL.

-- roger